History of Raging Fury

[Nineveh]

Below follows a brief historical overview of not only Raging Fury, but also of Antonius Bayle. This summary was originally written by Nineveh for applicants of Raging Fury as a first introduction to the guild, but upon request it has now been made available to everyone, though with certain modifications.

Raging Fury was created on "The Rathe" server in February 2001, albeit none of the founding members still reside within the guild as I am writing this summary. I personally did not join the guild until the move to Antonius Bayle took place, thus I will primarily focus on the events that occurred on the European server.

SoV/SoL

Immediately after the launch of Antonius Bayle, it became blatantly evident that this server would be one of the most congested. The player base consisted more or less solely of level 60 players with thorough raiding experience, something which was proven on the first night when more than 300 players found themselves lagging within the “Temple of Veeshan”.

Two guilds initially made a lasting impression, namely Darkwind and what was to become Mortalis. Darkwind had moved in unison from Ayonae Ro where they had already cleared the endgame raiding zone, though through moving to Antonius Bayle, thus avoiding the competition from Eternal Wrath, they hoped to secure the top spot on the new server. Oddly enough Mortalis was created merely through random invitations, which is further testimony to the amount of high quality players which relished the opportunity to play and hopefully raid end game content on a European based server. After going through several temporary names such as Europa Tribes and Northern Lights , Mortalis was finally chosen and became Darkwind’s main competition during the Velious and Luclin era.

The remaining guilds that fought for supremacy in the second tier were Innit, Justice Divine and Raging Fury. Both Darkwind and Mortalis had killed Vulak’Aerr within two weeks of the server opening, while the second tier guilds had barely begun exploring the northern parts of Veeshan’s temple, merely to illustrate the gap between the different guilds at this stage. Innit quickly fell apart due to internal problems, and Justice Divine became known for their trains and abusive language. Those of you who were not playing on Antonius Bayle at this stage might compare Justice Divine with Evolutia, who made a brief visit on Antonius Bayle prior to moving to Stromm. Justice Divine later decided to movelog to the French server, Sebilis, in the middle of the Planes of Power era.

Through the introduction of alternate advancement points, devoted players now had the opportunity to dramatically increase the power of their characters. Mortalis seemed to thrive during this expansion and widened the gap between themselves and Darkwind when they became the only guild on Antonius Bayle capable of defeating the Emperor of Ssra temple. Fearing they might lose their competitive edge, Darkwind suggested an alliance with Raging Fury, which became known as DWaRF. The alliance easily dissipated the emperor a few times, then dissolved as the need of such collaboration was no longer necessary.

Raging Fury managed to defeat the encounter in solitude a few weeks after, and just one week prior to the release of the Planes of Power expansion, Aten Ha Ra fell within Vex Thal, marking the completion of all available content to that date.

PoP

The Planes of Power expansion introduced five new levels, along with an abundance of much awaited raiding content. Darkwind became the first guild to obtain access to the elemental planes, much aided by a rather shady method of completing the Rallos Zek encounter. Mortalis completed the event a few weeks later.

Some months later, Mortalis lost the core of their leadership, and hoping to locate new potential recruits, they decided to movelog to the English server, Venril Sathir. The decision to move was highly controversial however, and many of their members decided to remain on Antonius Bayle, which set the guild back significantly.

As a result Darkwind had the elemental planes all to themselves, and strengthened their position as the now undisputed number one guild on Antonius Bayle. Raging Fury became the first tier two guild to obtain elemental access, and knowing that progress in the Plane of Time was highly dependent on gear, elemental armour farming became the primary objective for the guild, ignoring the allure of the elemental gods. Another guild was at this stage starting to display noteworthy progression, namely Shadows of Doom, who was merely lacking a Rallos Zek victory to secure access to the elemental planes.

Perpetual armour farming seemed somewhat tedious at times, and rumours of Raging Fury being on the brink of disbanding due to not being capable of entering the Plane of Time was all over Antonius Bayle. As soon as the armour farm was halted though, every elemental god was defeated with ease, and Raging Fury entered the Plane of Time.

Darkwind had just defeated Quarm for the first time as Raging Fury commenced their exploration of the endgame zone. With highly improved gear, Raging Fury literally obliterated the zone, going from Phase 1 to killing Quarm in less than three weeks. With six to eight months left until the release of the next expansion, Raging Fury was for once amply prepared for the upcoming challenges.

GoD

The Gates of Discord expansion was released in February 2004, and Darkwind initially progressed 1-2 weeks ahead of Raging Fury in Uqua. Many high end guilds, Afterlife perhaps the most noteworthy, left the game due to the amount of incomplete content released with this expansion. However both guilds finished Inktu’ta within one day of each other, sparking competition anew.

Raging Fury became the first guild to progress somewhat within Txevu, completing the Sandgarden event as the first guild on Antonius Bayle, and later the second guild serverwide to defeat High Priest Nkosi Bakari. Arch Overseers was at this stage the trailblazing guild serverwide, having long since entered Tacvi, which was to become a bane for many a raiding guild.

Darkwind leaped ahead once more by defeating Zun’Muram Tkarish Zyk aproximately one week before Raging Fury, but their progression halted at Pixtt Xxeric Kex.

Tacvi became one of the most memorable raiding zones for Raging Fury as every single named encounter was defeated first on Antonius Bayle. The Gates of Discord expansion was originally intended for players at level 65, which made the latter portions of the raiding zone all but impossible, though Raging Fury finished the expansion as the first guild on Antonius Bayle, and the fifth guild serverwide, finally residing in the position as the leading guild on the server.

OoW

The battle continued in the Omens of War expansion, and Raging Fury obtained access to the Citadel of Anguish merely 30 minutes earlier than Darkwind. A lot of animosity was displayed at this stage as both guilds accused the other of using their tactics. Guild relations had deteriorated a lot during the Gates of Discord expansion, and were only intensified through the intense competitive feeling between the guilds.

Once within Anguish however, the release of World of Warcraft and Everquest 2 severely impaired the guild. More than half of the old member base had apparently planned to migrate to World of Warcraft upon release, though they never felt the need to inform anyone of their decision. As a result practically all rading activity ceased, merely two days after Raging Fury became one of the first guilds to defeat Keldovan the Harrier.

Guild leadership and administration was at this stage replaced, and an intense recruitment period followed, which eventually brought new blood into the guild. Players coming from two European guilds on American servers, Divine Grace and Forsaken Realm, made it possible to continue raiding, and post a swift reflagging round, Anguish was attacked anew.

The coordination and efficiency of the “new” Raging Fury was unprecedented and the remaining portion of Anguish up to Overlord Mata Muram was cleared with ease. Through the completion of the Omens of War expansion, and through defeating Overlord Mata Muram as the first guild on Antonius Bayle, fifth serverwide, Raging Fury reinstated their position as the front running guild on Antonius Bayle.

DoN

Dragons of Norrath was released in the middle of the Omens of War expansion, and offered few challenges with the exception of Vishimtar the Fallen. Darkwind became the first guild serverwide to complete this encounter, while Raging Fury completed the event less than a day after. Somewhat disappointed the guild vowed to show that this was merely happenstance, a goal it achieved through defeating Overlord Mata Muram.

DoDH

Having seen what the guild was capable of, many members of Raging Fury had high expectations in regards to what they could accomplish in the Depths of Darkhollow expansion. Sendaii the Hive Queen and Master Vule were the two guardians of Mayong’s Demi Plane, and several guilds entered the new endgame zone around the same time.

Towards the end of the Omens of War expansion, all the European servers merged with Antonius Bayle, adding another guild that had defeated Overlord Mata Muram to the server roster, namely Tide. Merely 8 guilds had at this stage completed the Omens of War expansion, and three of those resided on Antonius Bayle, further evidence of the competitive level of the European server.

Darkwind were once again swift in the initial progression stages of the endgame zone, becoming the first guild to complete the first Tier of the Demi Plane, followed closely by Assent and Raging Fury. Cestus Dei seemed to be virtually untouchable in the last expansion, but now struggled to maintain supremacy on their own server, fiercely challenged by Township Rebellion.

The second tier of the Demi Plane, particularly the Performer encounter, ultimately became the barrier that separated the competing guilds. An event demanding the epitome of coordination and a highly DPS centered raid force was commented by the developers to be unbeatable in its current state. Raging Fury managed to best it however, and became the first guild serverwide to reveal the true identity of the endgame boss, Mayong Mismoore.

Inspired by their recent victory and the unique opportunity to be the first guild to finish the expansion, Raging Fury devoted themselves to learning the endgame encounter, and finally became the first guild to defeat Mayong Mistmoore, not only strengthening their position on Antonius Bayle, but also besting all the serverwide competition.

(as the end of DoDH also meant the retirement of our fearless leader Nineveh the Onerous, the remaining write-up will be done by Dalrek)

[Dalrek]

PoR - Prophecy of Ro

With the Prophecy of Ro expansion we saw something new. For some reason SoE had decided to make a large part of the progression non-instanced, giving me flashbacks of racing back in Velious. On a server like AB with 3 endgame guilds, this is bound to create some bottlenecks. Add to this that one of the major hurdles was a non-trackable spawn with as of yet no known trigger that on top off all this would depop within 30 mins or so, it was very hard to get the flagging done.

RF was first to get Daosheen and Suchun done, but I believe RF, Tide and DW all got the Sverag bottleneck flag mob done around the same time, granting access to Razorthorn with it's bugged instance lockouts.

At this point Tide pulled ahead of the rest by completing Razorthorn and entering Deathknell 3 weeks before the others, which allowed Tide to be the only guild on the server to defeat event 1 in DK in its original state, RF's best being around 10% when the event underwent changes in difficulty.

With the new changes to event 1 in place, RF blew through the following events, actually overtaking Tide in the process and finishing the zone 2 days ahead of Tide. Darkwind's struggles getting past event 1 resulted in several members leaving the guild and they had to go through a recruiting phase to finish the zone almost 2 months after RF and Tide


TSS - The Serpents Spine

Having finished PoR in good time before the next expansion was due, we decided to fill some of our schedule with some TSS beta raiding. This turned out to backfire once TSS went live. Not only did very little of our feedback make it into improving the events we had tested, but when it became clear how much work was ahead in TSS, several people reached the point of burnout and retired

The Serpents Spine expansion introduced what in the eyes of most raiders, the worst flagging path we have seen. Each guildmember had to complete 30+ individual missions as well as raise faction to be able to join raids. These followed the PoR pattern of taking place in non-instance zones, where people were also camping the same rare spawns needed for flagging, purely for their loot. So we saw 100+ people online in Ashengate all trying to camp the same 4-5 spots that was needed to meet the requirements that had been set to join raids. Only later in the expansion would flags be aquired by actual raiding. As mentioned above, this caused several members to retire due to the sheer amount of work required outside raidhours to not fall behind, while at the same time levelling up to the new level 75 cap

We got it done in a big team effort and started off by choosing the Ashengate path like most other guilds. Same did Darkwind and Tide. All 3 guilds killed Vergalid within the same week. After this, Darkwind started falling behind while Raging Fury and Tide ran a parallel progression with both guilds killing up to and including Dynleth within few days of each other. At this point Darkwind still had not entered Ashengate North

Lethar 2 turned out to be the real roadblock and while RF continued to throw ourselves at the encounter, after a while Tide seemed to turn their attention towards Frostcrypt and save Lethar 2 for later instead. This resulted in Raging Fury being the only guild on the server beating Lethar 2 in 2006, doing so in the begining of December, so we could all go on xmas break a few weeks later without thinking about this encounter waiting for us.

The race for AG was won. The race for FC and expansion completion was on

Turning our full attention on Frostcrypt, we quickly caught up to Tide, defeating Grenwald and gaining access to FC2 just 1 day after they did. close race followed in FC2 instance, ending with Tide killing Shadeking Beltron 2 days ahead of RF, thus freeing them to work on the only mob they were missing in the expansion, Lethar 2, while we were working on the last mob missing for us, Beltron. The oucome was Raging Fury killing Beltron and finishing the expansion 1 day before Tide killed Lethar 2 and finished it

Darkwind had still not entered FC 2 and had actually gained competition from behind in the form of upcommers Shadows of Doom who had set in a nice finish and was now also working on Lethar 2 along Darkwind, but ended up holding on to their 3rd spot on the server, finishing the expansion a couple months later

TBS - The Buried Sea

From one extreme to the other. Where TSS had tons of flagging mission that took a long time and several raids were not overly challenging, The Buried Sea expansion went the totally opposite way, with very short and fast flagging, giving everyone access to the endzone through 8 group missions without any flag raids at all. Basically anyone who could do the group missions, could enter Solteris, Throne of Ro...but the raids here proved to be some of the hardest we had seen for a long time and even after working on event 1 for a while, it seemed not doable without further farming in TSS first

So we kept doing our weekly AG/FC run, while working on Solteris progression. Eventually something paid off and Raging fury took the lead in Solteris and has stayed there throughout the entire expansion, taking first kills on all mobs and comleting the expansion almost 3 months ahead of 2nd place

As for the other guilds on the server, it was up and down. First we had Tide as a close competition, taking 2nd place on Sisters, Aprosis and Balreth, then suddenly coming to a complete halt for more than month. After a month DW caught up to Tide and passed them on event 4, 5 and 6 and Shadows of Doom still coming from behind and passing Tide and reaching same stage as Darkwind. DW seemed to loose their momentum though and the position for 2nd place ended up going to Shadows of Doom with both Darkwind and Tide finishing off on the same day one week after SoD

[Dalrek]

SoF - Secret of Faydwer

Having finished TBS in good time before the next expansion launch, we could focus on gearing up and getting ready for SoF and go directly for the new expansion mobs in stead of focusing on finishing TBS first

After our mandatory break to level up and getting access to trigger raids, we took out the first 5 flag mobs in 2 days. But then again, so did most of the guilds at our level. Little did we know the "tuning" changes that lay ahead, but we got our flagging done for Meldrath's Majestic Mansion

We continued 2008 in MMM and being one of the first guilds in the zone, we had the questionable pleasure of the Elevator of Doom which caused huge trains and wipes over and over. I think a lot of people were about ready to throw in the towel at this point. Not only in Raging Fury, but serverwide.

One of our strength however is to never give up and eventually it paid off with Breakneck going down, quickly followed by Krond and Prototype the next couple of days. Two more weeks and Tinkerson went down and Brinda following the week after that. After that Meldrath was disposed off surprisingly fast and we took a serverwide 4th spot for the zone and expansion mid-point, around 1 1/2 month ahead of the 2nd spot on the server

After this it was into flag farming mode to get keyed for Crystallos

Entering Crystallos, the first 3 wings were overrun quickly and we stood before Vyskudra, the first real challenge in the zone but even the mighty air dragon fell after a couple weeks of hard work

Eventually we were left with Kerafyrm which took us about a month work on various version of the fight in between patches, but he went down and we maintained our serverwide 5th ranking and once again in good time to get ready for the upcomming expansion

This expansion saw the guild Darkwind disband before finishing SoF and Shadows of Doom consolidating their 2nd place from TBS with Tide coming in 3rd

.. more to follow...

[Imrahil]

SoD - Seeds of Destruction

Shortly before the release of the next expansion Seeds of Destruction (SoD) there had been an announcement from SOE that they were planning to reduce the maximum raid size to 36. This announcement was met with a huge protest from guilds across all levels, mainly because it would hurt the healthy guilds to bench more than a dozen additional players and as such would mean another exodus of players. Also the point was brought forward that with so many distinctive classes EverQuest needed a certain raid size to allow every class to be able to get a raid spot. After the heated debate went on for a few weeks, SOE finally decided to draw back and return to the old maximum size of 54 players.

Throughout the whole expansion though the difficulty level indicated that the tuning was indeed done with a raid size much smaller than those 54 in mind, which is why the top guilds were all very close to each other during the race, with Raging Fury and Shadows of Doom beating the third tier “Field of Scale” on the same day and Tide close behind.
The “Plane of Earth” theme had an awful number of bugs especially in the “Rallos Returns” raid (which also lead to chances to be exploited by single players). While the event itself wasn’t really hard the random resets slowed RF down, while Shadows of Doom took the lead finishing off that tier 4 days ahead of RF, followed by Tide.
SoD seemed very motivated to win this expansion (after all, with that acronym it was fitting), so they continued to push hard and finished the endzone “Tower of Discord” as first guild on AB, with RF following less than a week later as fifth guild serverwide.

The assumption, that the raids in SoD had been tuned for the initially planned raid size received further backing up evidence when SOE added the exactly same raids on a different lockout-timer with new loot and a maximum raid size of precisely 36 as a band aid for the complaints about “lack of content”. This was quite easy to see when all top end guilds managed to beat the events with 36 players on the first attempt (with RF being the first guild to finish the Tower of Discord “hard raids” serverwide due to lock outs and the time zone advantage).

Shortly after the start of SoD our Guildleader Obsqura the Friendless stepped down from office, whom many players from across all servers may still remember for his work on maps for the previous expansions. As Dalrek also stopped playing EverQuest, Imrahil has inherited the duty of writing the history for now.


UF - Underfoot

After the “all-too-easy” expansion SoD the developers promised a more challenging experience with the next expansion Underfoot (UF) – and they kept their promise!

At the launch of UF many guilds considered themselves high end, because they managed to beat the expansion before the release of the new one and the gear level was pretty much the same across the top 25 guilds at least. Underfoot showed very clearly which guilds were really among the bleeding edge with less than 10 guilds even able to beat the expansion before the level increase coming with the next expansion, with a few long-time strong guilds collapsing, among them Tide on AB.

This left the race for the top spot on AB between SoD and RF, with SoD leaping ahead rather early on while RF still had its 2 weeks of leveling up and flagging. SoD continued to expand their lead to more than a month during the following events in T6 out of which “The Beast Below” stood out as an extremely challenging event (which was later nerfed multiple times to make it more accessible). RF closed the gap to 3 weeks during T7, until SoD came to a full stop though when they hit a road block called Trial of Creation. Raging Fury caught up to SoD with both guilds trying to beat the trial without success until it got nerfed down to a more reasonable (but still very demanding) difficulty, after which both guilds defeated the event on the same day and downed the next raid relatively fast, entering the end zone Convorteum on the same day.

The first 5 events in this zone proved to be less of a challenge than many of the lower tier raids, so RF and SoD raced towards the endboss simultaneously. Event 6 proved to be the first challenge in Convorteum and it also was at this time that RF finally went ahead of SoD by more than a day, beating the event 3 days earlier. Motivated by the chance to win the expansion Raging Fury used the momentum and finished the endboss of Underfoot 5 days before SoD as fourth guild serverwide.

With Tide gone the third guild to beat UF became D’Pikeys finishing the expansion more than 2 months later after the level increase provided by the next expansion, but still among the top 15 guilds serverwide.

[Imrahil]

HoT - House of Thule

When the next expansion was released everyone assumed a more forgiving expansion than Underfoot and this proved to be the case indeed. Although the event "Ritual of Terror" from the first tier was commonly deemed "too hard for its intended tier", it wasn’t the event itself which stopped the top end guilds, but the bugs in the event script leading to random resets, not triggering third phase etc. Once again the race between SoD and RF began with SoD entering the second tier 2 days ahead of RF.
That small lead was extended among other things by the fact that the raid "The Force of Eternity" (deemed the hardest raid in all of HoT by many) was made unavailable for two weeks 1 day after RF wiped at 5 % while SoD had beaten it the day before. SoD kept that 2 week lead during the rest of that tier, beating the last event in T3 just before Christmas while RF followed after their break during the first week of January.

The hopes of Raging Fury, that the endzone Sanctus Somnium could be able to hold SoD on their march towards being the first guild on AB to beat House of Thule were misplaced as the complete zone was cleared by SoD in 10 days, making them the fourth guild serverwide to beat the expansion with RF following as number 5 about 2 weeks later. D’Pikeys consolidated their third rank on AB by beating HoT a bit more than 3 months later as 12th guild serverwide.

The whole expansion had lasted less than 4 months for the top 5 guilds with many more beating it before the release of the next one, among them Ancient Dominion (AD) as fourth guild on AB, so once again there was a level playing field among many guilds when the next expansion hit the virtual shelves in November 2011.

[Imrahil]

VoA - Veil of Alaris

During the last expansions a certain wave pattern had established, with a rather easy expansion followed by a hard one. According to that pattern many expected quite a few challenging events during VoA and while it was overall not as brutal and unforgiving as UF there were certainly some raids which in their original form would have proven unbeatable for more than a dozen guilds (if that many).

The flagging mechanism in VoA had been changed away from pure keys which were handed out to a raid book, in which the victories were written down. A certain number of victories in one tier flagged the player for the next tier, with higher events backflagging for lower ones. While this was rather nice for many guilds as it made the process of flagging new members seemless, it was a logistical nightmare for progression guilds pushing towards the next tier, because the target had to be to get as many fully flagged as fast as possible. This was leading to some frustrations among players, who missed one victory early on and had to sit out regularly in the next weeks.
Another new invention was the idea to make group missions based on raids (or vice versa), apparently the attempt to bring raiders and groupers closer together. Obviously the complexity of a raid script must be higher than for only 6 players, but many of the general mechanisms stayed the same. This frustrated many groupers as they had problems with the rather unforgiving tasks in the higher tiers, but it also annoyed raiders who felt they lost part of the fun by simply repeating what they learned in a group mission on a larger scale instead of a completely new event.

The tuning in the lower tiers of VoA at least seemed more appropriate than in the previous expansion: while HoT had an issue with one of the harder raids being in the first tier (RoT), in VoA all raids in the lower 2 tiers were fitting for their intended audience, so it was no wonder that SoD and RF were able to overcome them rather easily with RF being 1 day behind. That 1 day lead held true for the first 2 events in T3 also, but SoD was able to beat the last T3 event 6 days earlier than RF.
The first 3 events in tier 4 were needed to enter the final zone called Sepulcher and during those events RF managed to reduce the gap to 3 days behind SoD, still hoping that by a strong finish a similar coup like during UF would be possible. SoD though were even able to extend that lead back to 6 days during the third event in Sepulcher which in its original form was an extremely hard event with adds tripling for 40 K and a boss who could shred through a tank under defensive in an instant. Both guilds needed the same time to beat the relatively easy event 4, so RF was still six days behind SoD when coming to the final event – The Triune God..

The Triune God in its original form can only be described as a testimony of what EverQuest players are willing to do in order to beat an expansion. Being an event which lasted more than 2 hours with a plethora of emotes in 3 stages, without any form of saving point or even a short resting period (eg. for a bio break) and complexity which reduced every previous raid choreography to Halfling size, it forced every guild except the current “King of the Hill” Realm of Insanity to a halt. Having to learn step by step with sometimes only 2 tries possible per evening as the final phase merely started after 2 hours it was no wonder that all following guilds needed more than a week (most of them considerably more) to figure it out. Around that time RF lost its two main raid leaders in the time frame of 3 weeks together with a few other members, so the race on AB was over, before it even really started and SoD finished the expansion as third guild serverwide with RF following a month behind as fifth of only 6 guilds able to beat the Triune God in its original version on all servers.

After a retune which shortened the duration and added a saving point after phase 2 a few more guilds were able to overcome the Triune God, among them D’Pikeys who were able to finish the expansion another 2 months later, confirming their place among the top twelve guilds serverwide and number 3 on Antonius Bayle.